Ashes to Ashes
by Magery
Summary: He just wanted to watch the world burn, and she'd always be his flame.


**Author's Note: **This is set in an alternate universe. The differences to canon should be immediately obvious.

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**Revenge isn't something you can truly live for. But it doesn't matter if you're already dead.**

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She remembered, as the memories faded, the first time she saw him, back when the only mask she knew was that of Kallen Stadtfeld, back when lies and betrayal were merely strangers rather than the oldest of friends. She remembered the confliction, how the little voice in the back of her head had told her to run away, to hide, to forget she'd ever seen that faceless apparition. How despite that she'd been drawn in by his words, how he weaved truth and lies and everything in between and turned them into hope. Hope for revenge.

She'd confronted him in a shower, held a knife to him like it would scare him, like he was truly mortal. It made no sense to her – she knew how men died, knew how simple it was to take a life and _end_ it. Her brother had been cut down like he was anyone else – even in death he'd taught her one final lesson: that oblivion came to one man just as easily as any other. But despite that, despite everything, that little voice in the back of her head had told her death meant nothing to him, that he was already beyond the void. Much like her.

And as she'd pulled his arm towards her, she'd chanced to look down at his bare arm, the arm he hid behind the midnight uniform he wore like a funeral shroud. And she's seen the cuts, seen the despair he carved into his flesh like it was nothing more than a shell. She'd asked him what they were, even though she already knew. He'd laughed a laugh that she knew well, and told her they were for his mother, for his sister, for everyone Britannia had taken away from him. He'd taken a knife from his pocket, a blade to match her own, and asked her if she knew what day it was.

He answered for her, just as he'd laid the knife against his arm, on the second scar.

"Today marks the seventh year since my sister was taken from me."

The blood that stained the floor beneath them was red, red like the way his curse burned in his eyes, the curse he'd shown to her when she'd asked how he'd killed Prince Clovis. The curse he'd been given as a child, that he'd mastered because when compared to death, control was nothing but another lie, and lies were his stock in trade.

He'd turned away, pulling down the sleeve of his uniform as she wondered if perhaps that was another reason he wore it, to hide the blood that stained him like it stained his past. But before he'd opened the door, he'd told her something else, a location and a time.

She wondered what her life would be like, if she'd hadn't joined him from the beginning, if she hadn't decided who, and what, he was didn't matter, not when he gave them victory. Would she still have been Q1 if she'd waited and hung back like Tamaki, or never trusted him like Minami?

Of course she would have been. She was too skilled, too good at taking blood and bones and flesh and _life_ and turning them into nothingness. Zero's red right hand, crimson hair disguised against the paint of her Guren which disguised the blood she spilled for him, that she offered up to a faceless god as a sacrifice for everything she'd lost, to replace what was gone with what she'd taken.

But he wasn't faceless, was he? She'd seen behind the mask. She'd seen the tainted purple eyes, tainted by the very blood she worshipped him with. She'd seen the inky black hair that she liked to run her hands through like his darkness ran through her. She'd seen his flawlessly, tragically, breathtakingly beautiful face; it was as pale as the ghost he resembled when he haunted her dreams like she haunted his waking hours, forever hovering over his shoulder like an angel to match his demons. When they lay tangled twixt flesh and sheets, when she wasn't sure if he was crying her name or she was crying his, when he slipped into unconsciousness before her and she could watch his face rather than his mask, she knew him.

He was… he was more than human, beyond her comprehension: too brilliant and too broken for anyone to understand. No, that was a lie. In the depths of her soul, in the places even he'd never reached, she understood him; understood him better than any other.

He was a god of vengeance – not an avatar of hope but one of destruction, existing only to raze everything to the ground, to set the world on fire and watch it burn. He was not a knight of justice, not what anyone made him out to be, and anyone else would kill him in his sleep.

But she was broken too, and he knew it. Broken by her brother, her mother, by the corpse riddled with bullets and the corpse she'd found hanging from the ceiling the day after. She was no stranger to death, and neither was he – they knew it like they knew each other. It was what bound them together, what danced through their dreams, what had shattered the ice and blown out the fire, leaving nothing but lingering cold and drifting ash.

She couldn't remember when it happened, but one day she'd found him slouched on a crate, the needle pressed to his skin, hand so steady she knew it wasn't his first time. She hadn't snatched it out of his grip, hadn't wrenched it from his grasp and watched it shatter on the floor. She'd asked him if it hurt, if when the happiness faded he remembered why it was gone and broke anew. He'd given her that half-bitter, half-amused smile, and asked her how she knew.

This time, she was the one to bare her arm, to show him the fading punctures that covered it like the holes had covered her brother's body. She told him she'd grown tired of the endless fall that followed the rush, that one day she simply couldn't deal with associating despair with happiness. She asked him if he was tired too, and he'd nodded, but he never let go of the needle, and his hand never shook.

So she'd done the only thing she could – she'd surrendered to the darkness in order to save it, had dropped the last barriers keeping them apart and claimed him as her own as he claimed her in turn. It hurt at first – the pain wasn't only physical, for she knew that now she was forever bound to him, that the fragments of her heart that somehow beat faster when he was around would never let her leave him again, no matter how far down the path of blood he went.

But in those brief moments, snatched from the cruel, heartless world, she'd finally found something she didn't associate with despair. And she'd seen his eyes, seen that he'd found something too. Not quite happiness, not quite joy, not quite love, for those were concepts they'd forgotten long ago. They'd found… they'd found each other. And somewhere along the line they'd been reforged, two shattered souls using one another to patch the holes in everything they'd ever been.

Eventually they'd been discovered – even they, who'd been hiding secrets for as long as they could remember, couldn't hide the lingering touches, the easy familiarity that spoke of bonds blurring the line between commander and ace pilot, the glances that lasted a little too long even though his mask was sometimes physical. Rumours had spread, amidst the closest things they had to friends and amidst their soldiers. Friends were easily dealt with, for they saw no harm in it, and some who knew better than others were relieved, for they had sometimes glimpsed the darkness and thought it was being held at bay, if only for a while.

His knights required a firmer hand, so when they started to question them, to suggest she gained her place unjustly and to wonder if perhaps what joined them together could compromise the operations he commanded, he simply threw down the gauntlet: anyone who doubted her, and her skills in a Knightmare, could challenge her to a duel, and anyone who doubted him and his ability to remain impartial was welcome to try and win the war in his stead.

And so they continued on, knights fighting for justice whilst their king and queen fought for nothingness, to return their oblivion to that which gave it to them. They won and won again, because it didn't matter which chamber held the bullet, not to them. But slowly, ever so slowly, his pieces began to notice, began to wonder if some day they'd become acceptable losses, consumed by vengeance, sacrificed to her dark god and his bloody angel.

They began to see what lay behind her eyes, see how the shadows seemed to lengthen when he entered the room, how she hunted down every last Britannian and consumed them in crimson fire, how he would sit and watch her, smiling behind his mask. And they began to fear, for they feared what they did not understand; they feared for themselves and perhaps, in their heart of hearts, for the world. As well they should.

But still they delayed; still they put the results before the methods, for what the truly wanted was Japan to be freed. And that was Zero and Q1 gave them, when they crushed what remained of Britannia in the first and last battle for Tokyo. He was without mercy, and she was the physical embodiment of his wrath. She slew two Knights of the Rounds that day, watched them die just like everyone else. She could have killed a third, but something stayed both their hands, and they let him go, to return the message they'd carved into Britannia's flesh.

And their knights rejoiced, for Japan was free, and for a while they could forget everything they'd seen in their king and queen. But Britannia returned, as he had predicted, as she'd prayed for every night before she collapsed into his body like she belonged there, completely spent.

The White Prince thought that they, that Zero, fought for freedom, and thought the invasion was foolish, for he knew it would cost Britannia so much more than it would gain. He was as wrong and as right as he'd ever been. The Emperor did not care why they fought, for he thought nothing mattered except for Ragnarok – he did what he could to prolong the conflict, to allow himself more time to usher in Armageddon. He was as foolish and as wise as he'd ever been.

They fought Britannia for a year, decimated superior numbers, superior forces and sometimes superior strategies, for where the Black Knights failed, their master and his mistress did not. They had won battles simply by arriving, towards the end of the war, because nobody wanted to face hell _before_ they died. Nobody wanted to be hunted down like cattle, slaughtered by a demon's claw, by despair nobody could go beyond.

And finally, finally the Emperor, for the White Prince was long since dead, slain by Zero's hand when her Knightmare consumed the Avalon in bloody fire, realized that even Ragnarok would not save him: the Sword of Akasha required the resources of an empire to build, for as Britannia had discovered in Japan, a god was not slain so easily. And he had no resources: they had been spent on the failed conquest and lost as other Areas rebelled when they saw the wounds rent by black knights and silver claws.

So Charles di Britannia had finally entered the field, to crush his prodigal son, with the only remaining Knight of the Round to herald his arrival. The Knight of One was powerful, far more powerful than any other, a true match for the crimson queen. But the Emperor did not understand that fighting one was to fight the other, that they were linked in a way he could neither comprehend nor understand. So it should have come to him as no surprise when Bismarck fell, burned to nothingness by Zero's wrath.

She had come at him alone, alone against Britannia's most powerful knight and his personal army. And she had destroyed that army, for they could not touch her, and in his arrogance the Knight of One trusted only to Excalibur. He never used his Geass until it was too late, until she'd dodged his blasts of power again and again, completely ignoring him to annihilate soldier after soldier. He'd tried to chase her, to close the distance and make her fight him, but she was too fast, and his own troops got in his way.

And when his army had been destroyed, when the battle should have been a duel to the death, one against one, her army had arrived. The Gawain rose into the sky, and all around the Knight of One, like his own forces has been resurrected and turned against him, the Black Knights rose with him. After a year of war, they too had surrendered to the darkness in their king and queen's hearts, had accepted what lay behind their eyes. Had slowly been consumed until they were no more than empty vessels to serve Zero's will.

They were much like her, but she'd been empty from the start. It had taken a miracle to return her to some semblance of life, but a god was nothing without miracles. He'd filled her with hope for revenge, with the shadows in his soul, with his body and his essence and everything he'd ever been. And she had let him in, had accepted him in every way, and in return fulfilled him, disguised his brokenness as he disguised hers, needed him the way he needed her.

The Knight of One had opened his eye, and foreseen his death, seen the hail of fire allowed him only one path to freedom, the path that led him to glinting talons, hellfire and damnation. And so Excalibur, the symbol of his mastery, the sword that was granted only to the Sword of the Empire blurred through the air, and Bismarck Waldstein was no more.

But Zero had not quite finished, and neither had his queen. She remembered the assault on the Emperor, how easy it was to crush his armies like his Britannia had crushed her so long ago, how easy it was to break them like she'd been broken.

And her king laughed all the while, laughed as his father was brought before him in chains, laughed as he gazed into his eyes like they were a mirror, seeing in them what she'd seen in him and he'd seen in her. Zero had paraded the Emperor around the world, but this time she was not one pace behind him. This time she was beside him, matching him step for step like she matched him in everything else. For they had finally returned the favour, finally broken Britannia as they had been broken so very long ago. They had finally turned everything their enemies loved into ashes, into the ashes that had once been all that remained to them.

Their vengeance was complete.

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Lelouch vi Britannia, as they would later discover Zero to have been, and Kallen Kozuki-Stadtfeld were found dead in each other's arms the next day, their knives buried in one another's hearts, held there by one of his hands, and one of hers. They'd died just like anybody else.

There was no note, no reason, no explanation.

There never had been.


End file.
